Unlocking Platform Engineering for Organizational Success @ Cloud Native Zurich, Jun 2025

Platform engineering has established itself as a reliable approach for the cloud native tech generation. But what really makes a standout platform? Is it the technology? Is it a product focus? And how do we measure “organizational success” from a platform point of view?

Rather than theorize, let’s look at how large, forward-thinking organizations like Adidas, Spotify, ING or SAP are leveraging platform engineering to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale. Turns out a good platform approach not only provides helpful, easy to use services, but can actually unlock organizational bottlenecks and improve team dynamics and interactions (aka “the culture”).

Some proven patterns include organizing teams along value streams inside coherent platform groupings, setting expectations for platform interactions (beyond the APIs!), focusing on business and flow metrics, intentionally addressing consumer/provider mismatches, a platform manifesto for shared understanding, and more!

Join this talk to unlock your platform engineering success!

Transcript

1. Unlocking Platform Engineering for Organizational Success
2. Team Topologies Organizing business and technology for fast flow Matthew Skelton & Manuel Pais IT Revolution Press, 2019 teamtopologies.com/book Over 200k copies sold
4. What is a Platform? 6
5. “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product.” – Evan Bottcher, 2018 7
6. 8 Is AWS a platform? Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
7. “A digital platform is a foundation of self-service APIs, tools, services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product that reduces the cognitive load of its customers.” – Manevan Skeltcher 9
8. 10 Is AWS a platform? Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash
9. ⚠ A mandated platform increases the cognitive load on teams (i.e. slows them down) 11
10. 12 Platforms need to be driven by business and user needs, not technology first.
11. Case Study Spotify [Music Streaming] 13
12. Case Study 14 https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/08/27/how-we-improved-developer-productivity-for-our-devops-teams/
13. Case Study 15 https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/08/27/how-we-improved-developer-productivity-for-our-devops-teams/
14. Case Study 16 https://engineering.atspotify.com/2020/08/27/how-we-improved-developer-productivity-for-our-devops-teams/
15. 17 Platforms need to be designed to scale.
16. Case Study Adidas [Sportswear Retail] 18
17. Case Study 19 https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/431737448/
20. 22 “platform team” = stream-aligned team working inside a platform grouping
21. 23 Organize around streams / services owned by dedicated teams inside the platform
22. 24 Independent Service Heuristics “Rules-of-thumb for identifying candidate value streams and domain boundaries by seeing if they could be run as a separate SaaS/cloud product. ” A kind of DDD-lite to help find suitable candidates for separate Stream-aligned team responsibilities. https://github.com/TeamTopologies/Independent-Service-Heuristics
23. 25 Independent Service Heuristics 1. Sense-check: Could it make any logical sense to offer this thing "as a service"? 2. Brand: Could you imagine this thing branded as a public cloud service (like AvocadoOnline.com 🥑)? 3. Revenue/Customers: Could this thing be managed as a viable cloud service in terms of revenue and customers? 4. Cost tracking: Could the organisation currently track costs and investment in this thing separately from similar things? 5. Data: Is it possible to define clearly the input data (from other sources)? 6. User Personas: Could this thing have a small/well-defined set of user types or customers (user personas)? 7. Teams: Could a team or set of teams effectively build and operate a service based on this thing?
24. 26 Platform growth needs evolving team interactions.
25. Case Study 27 https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/431737448/
26. Case Study 28 https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch/431737448/
27. 29 Platform teams expected to intentionally adopt & alternate their interaction modes (with internal teams)
29. 31 Invest in building trust early, “plant the seed” for platform adoption later
30. 32 Platforms need strong product management.
31. Case Study SAP [Enterprise Software] 33
32. Case Study “Adhering to legal regulations of over 180 countries… while running for decades at customers on-prem” 34 Dirk Lehmann - Platform Engineering XXL DevOpsDays 💖 https://devopsdays.org/
33. Case Study 35
34. Case Study “everyone from dev to delivery under one organization reduced a lot of friction (…) and we have a prod mgmt team because we are building a product” 36
35. Case Study 37 “goal of the platform is to relieve development teams from cognitive load due to common, painful tasks” 🎉
36. 38 Platforms need to demonstrate business value.
37. 39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwaRKcjkAAo
38. 40 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwaRKcjkAAo BIZ LANGUAGE
40. 42 Traffic served through platform services 😴
41. 43 Revenue served through platform services 😀
42. 44 Platforms need to start small & grow based on demand.
43. Case Study ING [Banking] 45
44. Case Study “ensuring discoverability through a central marketplace with consistent naming conventions” 46
45. Case Study “as platforms demonstrate broader applicability, they may evolve to a higher level, potentially becoming global” 48
46. 49 reduces cognitive load request-based serves user needs shared services self-service increases cognitive load ← Traditional Digital → enforced follows market forces large platform teams small-ish stream-aligned teams
47. teams & interactions over tools & functionality adoption & engagement over mandates & standards rich customer experience over technical prowess open to change and collaborate to discover user needs unblocking internal customers via self-service patterns aiming for superlinear impact with sublinear growth Platform Manifesto teamtopologies.com/platform-manifesto
48. teamperature.com
49. 52 Book Signing 12pm at Puzzle ITC booth Win a Spot in the Leadership Masterclass